Face yoga 101: 5 beginner-friendly moves to tone your face

In recent years, the skincare and makeup industry has diversified greatly into physical beauty techniques such as gua sha, face rollers, acu-pressure point therapy, cupping, lymphatic massage methods, and now face yoga.

According to the Los Angeles-based face yoga trainer, Koko Hayashi, face yoga is a popular method in Japan. It’s largely used to regain youthfulness by “waking up sleeping muscles in the skin” to lift saggy skin and relax tensed muscles.

According to Hayashi, face yoga is “a great way to force your face muscles to relax”. She believes that sagging muscles and skin on your face dupes your brain into thinking that you’re grumpy and upset – therefore inducing a negative psyche on you. Manipulating and releasing your stressed facial muscles will hijack this process by forcing yourself to smile and sending the right message to your brain instead.

According to Hayashi, face yoga is just like any other form of exercise, dance, or workout – you begin with a warm up, followed by the actual workout.

To warm up and prep your face, take a deep inhalation, and blow raspberries to loosen and relax those cheek muscles. Repeat that three times. Do not just purse and buzz your lips. Instead, you will want to vibrate and shake out those cheeks.

Then comes the actual workout. A simple face yoga pose to start with? Try lifting the corners of your mouth. “With age, the corners of our mouth start sagging,” she says, resulting in what we often deem the “RBF’.

Here’s how you do it: First, get yourself into a big, wide, smile, showing your upper row of teeth only. Keep smiling, keep showing that row of upper teeth, and stick your tongue downwards, swing it up towards the left, then back down pointing towards the floor, then swing it towards the right. You can repeat that for three to five rounds.

You will find a variety of other face yoga styles and exercises on YouTube or Instagram, such as @faceyoga_monna who usually prefers to make use of a continuous tapping method to release the forehead muscles and wrinkles (pictured above), crow’s feet, laugh lines, eyebags, and more. Monna’s technique is more soothing, relaxing, and massage-like – something that you can do quite easily while watching Netflix, or in bed.

(Here are “The 16 Best Anti-Ageing Products That Keep Wrinkles And Fine Lines At Bay“)

If you prefer an actual face yoga class, look to @face.toned on Instagram where you will find short face yoga teasers or sign up for actual online classes to follow. Here, a short face yoga exercise to release tense jaws – first rub some face oil into your palms and over the jaw area. Knead those jaw muscles with your knuckles in circular motion. Then, grab a pair of plastic gloves (or wash your hands and scrub your nails clean) and get those fingers in to the back of your cheeks and knead those jaw muscles out in circular motion. This one’s great if you suffer from tension headaches (around the front of your head and temples).

If you sit at your desk all day crouching over a desktop PC or laptop, this face yoga pose releases neck and upper back tension.

Clench your hands in a fist, and straighten your arms out before you to feel a wide, upper back stretch. Then, roll your head slowly and upwards in a 45 degree angle to face the ceiling, and pucker your lips to feel the full stretch on your face and side of your neck. Repeat this on the other side.

This article was first published in Women’s Weekly.

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